People Ask: “Where did you get all the old commentaries, sermons, dictionaries, etc. for Power Bible?

Answer: Mostly from men of God who wrote before the 20th century. Some of them are still in print: Matthew Henry, Thomas Scott, Adam Clark, Charles Spurgeon, John Wesley, and Matthew Poole for example. They were all from England, but not all from the Church of England. A few like Albert Barnes were from the “new world” of America.

I was delighted to see how many of these old-timers quoted each other. Wesley frequently borrowed from Poole almost word for word. Spurgeon and almost everybody still uses Matthew Henry. That tells us how much Henry and Poole were respected and why they are still in print today.

But as we read old commentaries, we come across still older names: Philip Doddridge, William Burkitt, and even Sir Isaac Newton (who wrote comments on Revelation)! These volumes are pretty rare even on the internet, though quite a few are now being reprinted “on demand.”

What follows is a list of mostly very old authors which influenced the Power Bible. Many are quoted by name multiple times within the venerable British Family Bible produced by two chaplains of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1817. Their lives and writings are more fully described in the Power Bible author index.